On the old surgical ward, a nurse on night duty could sit at the desk and see all eight to ten of her patients. If you needed a hand, as a nurse on the same ward put it, you could “just pop your head out the curtain.”
In 2011 they moved into the new Tunbridge Wells Hospital, the first NHS hospital in England with nothing but single rooms for inpatients. The design had been championed to cut infections, falls and noise.
A team from King’s College London interviewed nurses after the move. “As soon as I’m in a room I’m away from everybody,” said one on the surgical ward. On the assessment unit, a nurse said you “can’t eyeball nurses enough to know that they’re drowning and they need help.”
The nurses had to change the way they worked, and they felt ill prepared for it.
The move and the moving on
The move happened in two phases, in January and September. What the nurses were going through had no date on it.
William Bridges built a model on that gap. “Change is situational,” he wrote in an article dated 2006 on his firm’s website. “Transition, on the other hand, is a three-phase psychological reorientation process that people go through when they are coming to terms with change.” Change happens on a date. Transition happens inside, and it starts with an ending.
Three phases, starting at the end
Bridges named the phases an ending, the neutral zone and a new beginning. His firm’s site calls the order “paradoxical but true”: transition starts with an ending, as people work out what they are losing, which may be relationships, processes, team members or locations.
Plans tend to list what is arriving: at Tunbridge Wells, rooms, bathrooms and views of a wooded valley. What was leaving was harder to see, because nobody had designed it: the glance down the ward, the shout for help, the good habit picked up by overhearing a colleague behind a curtain. “I think that’s definitely missing,” a junior sister said of that last one.
Next comes the neutral zone, which Bridges called “a no-man’s land.” Old behaviors and attitudes die out before people move in a new direction. He described it as a dangerous time for organizations but also one when experiments have an especially good chance. At the hospital, staff teams tried new routines by trial and error. On the assessment unit, falls and medication errors rose right after the move and fell back to previous levels about nine months later. The researchers doubted the rooms were the cause and offered the disruption of the move as one explanation. They didn’t use Bridges’ model; reading their findings through it is an interpretation.
A new beginning, in Bridges’ account, comes only after the first two phases. “It is always easier to take the people out of Egypt (or any old system),” he wrote, “than it is to take the old Egypt system out of people.” Leaders, he wrote, can give people a piece of the past to take with them. The surgical ward did something like that: it kept a central handover of all staff every morning, which its manager saw as a way to hold on to the ward’s identity. Its team reported adapting fairly quickly. Staff on the assessment unit, which also faced sicker patients, an unusual layout and staffing trouble, reported taking more than six months to settle in.
A consultant’s map, not a measured law
Bridges was a literature professor at Mills College until 1974, when he resigned to study transition. By his firm’s account, his own struggles with big changes set him off. Transitions (1980) was written for individuals; Managing Transitions (1991) drew on his consulting work with organizations. The model grew out of his life and practice, not out of experiments. The firm, which sells training in the model, says leaders and consultants have used it for more than 30 years.
Long use isn’t evidence. Tests of the model itself, of whether people pass through the phases in this order or whether attending to endings makes a change succeed, are hard to find. In studies that use it, the model often serves as a lens for reading interviews. A 2026 study of a mentoring program for international nursing students in Australia, with seven participants, mapped its themes onto Bridges’ phases, and its authors warned that presenting experiences in phases “may inadvertently imply linearity.” Bridges blurred the edges himself: that no-man’s land can begin before people leave the old way, he wrote, and there can be “months and even years” before they feel at home in the new one.
Nor do the phases tell you how long. Two wards made the same move into the same building, and one took far longer to settle. They differed in leadership, staffing and how many other changes landed at once, and the three phases alone don’t say which would take longer. The change curve tracks feelings over time and ADKAR asks which step a person missed; Bridges’ question is what is ending.
The channel that got archived
Imagine a team lead whose five-person team is folded into a bigger department on the first of the month. The org chart updates overnight, the new stand-ups start, and the old team’s chat channel is archived. A month later her people still message each other privately before asking anything in the big channel, and the new manager calls it cliquishness.
Ask what ended. The old channel was where a junior engineer could ask a basic question without an audience. If that is the loss, a speech about the exciting new department speaks to a beginning the team hasn’t reached. A small channel for newcomers’ questions, set up on purpose, names what went and puts something in its place.
Skip the question, and the private messages will probably carry on, just out of the manager’s sight.